{"id":139280,"date":"2019-09-05T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139280"},"modified":"2019-09-05T10:43:41","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T14:43:41","slug":"the-uncanny-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/05\/the-uncanny-child\/","title":{"rendered":"The Uncanny Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Linda Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd\u2019s novella <\/em>Welcome to America and the end of childhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Village of the Damned<\/em> (1960)<\/p><\/div>\n

Every night when I was a child, my mother asked me to set the table before dinner. I came to believe that if there was anything odd among the four place settings\u2014a chipped plate, say, or a knife from a different pattern\u2014the one I gave it to would die. My habit in the beginning was to give it to my brother; later, my mother, and later still my father. I can\u2019t explain these decisions. Night after night, no one would die, but my belief in this power, my fear of this power, persisted. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I\u2019d mostly outgrown the belief. I had talked myself out of other secret, compulsive behaviors, like counting things pointlessly, never stepping on a certain corner tile in the foyer. Still, when setting the table, I began to take the doomed object, the portent, for myself\u2014superstitiously, just in case.<\/p>\n

Ellen, the eleven-year-old narrator of Linda Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd\u2019s recently released novella Welcome to America<\/em><\/a>, believes she has similar powers, but life has provided her with more evidence that they\u2019re real: \u201cMy dad\u2019s dead. Did I mention that? It\u2019s my fault. I prayed out loud to God for him to die and he did.\u201d In the aftermath, Ellen has stopped talking or even writing\u2014communication is dangerous, any crossing of the barrier between inner life and outer world. \u201cYou should never ask for what you want,\u201d Ellen says, or maybe thinks\u2014the transmission of this confession somehow bypasses her silence.<\/p>\n

It disturbs the order of things. The way you really want them. You want to be disappointed. You want to be hurt and have to struggle to get over it. You want the wrong presents on your birthday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ellen does not feel remorse about her father, whose moods were erratic and threatened violence; he made her mother and everyone unhappy: \u201cI never felt guilty about wishing he was dead.\u201d She reasons it was murder in self-defense and, further, she is not fully responsible, since she achieved the killing through prayer. God is her coconspirator: \u201cIt was me and God who\u2019d killed my dad. We\u2019d done it together, once and for all.\u201d But she is afraid of her own power, \u201cthe power there was in me speaking.\u201d She quickly realizes silence is another kind of power\u2014the power of withholding what other people want (\u201cIt was so easy. Just stopping. From one moment to the next my life was changed\u201d). It\u2019s a power she must have the strength of will to maintain: \u201cSometimes I\u2019m scared I\u2019ll talk in my sleep. That someone will hear me and hold it against me at some future time.\u201d Ellen has spent so much of her childhood in fear. In her silence, finally, she becomes frightening; a threat and not the threatened.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Horror movies are full of silent, glaring children\u2014the demonic little blondes in Village of the Damned<\/em>; the twins at the end of the hallway in The Shining<\/em>; tiny telekinetic Drew Barrymore in Firestarter<\/em>. Part of the creep factor of the silent child is that we don\u2019t know what they\u2019re thinking. Are they judging us? Scheming? A truly silent child stares like a doll. In his definitive essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud mentions a woman patient who \u201ceven at the age of eight\u201d was still convinced that \u201cher dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular way, with as concentrated a gaze as possible.\u201d What\u2019s uncanny about a living doll or a doll-like child is not the realization of a childhood fear, Freud argues \u201cthe child had no fear of its doll coming to life, it may even have desired it.\u201d Rather the doll reminds us of \u201can infantile wish,\u201d the wish to make something true just by thinking it\u2014desire as a power in itself.<\/p>\n

Freud goes on to tell an anecdote about another patient who had an excellent stay in a spa owing mostly to his room, \u201cwhich immediately adjoined that of a very amiable nurse.\u201d When he returned to the establishment,<\/p>\n

he asked for the same room but was told that it was already occupied by an old gentleman, whereupon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words \u201cWell, I hope he\u2019ll have a stroke and die.\u201d A fortnight later the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an \u201cuncanny\u201d experience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Freud calls this type of experience \u201comnipotence of thoughts,\u201d a \u201cnarcissistic overestimation\u201d of the influence of our desires. Irrational narcissism is natural in children, but we unlearn it in adulthood. When a flash of it returns, there\u2019s recognition. The uncanny, for Freud, is the eerily familiar, \u201csomething familiar and old \u2026 estranged only by the process of repression.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Disappearance of Childhood<\/em>, Neil Postman argues that the construct of adulthood is based partially on shame. Children, he writes, \u201care immersed in a world of secrets, surrounded by mystery and awe.\u201d Adults make the world intelligible to children by teaching them \u201chow shame is transformed into a set of moral directives.\u201d Adults know the rules, what can and cannot be said, what words and acts are shameful. \u201cFrom the child\u2019s point of view, shame gives power and authority to adulthood.\u201d According to Postman, the gap between childhood and adulthood was a side effect of literacy. In the Middle Ages, childhood ended at seven \u201cbecause that is the age at which children have command over speech.\u201d The chasm widened in the age of print because there was so much more to learn: \u201cA new kind of adulthood had been invented. From print onward, adulthood had to be earned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd\u2019s Ellen knows on some level that speaking and writing are connected to a transformation she resists. She doesn\u2019t want to grow up. \u201cI stopped talking when growing began to take up too much space inside me,\u201d she thinks. Among the tallest in her class, she can\u2019t control her growth spurts the way she can control her speech: \u201cI couldn\u2019t refuse food. My hunger was too great.\u201d Growing up is noisy\u2014her mother, a stage actress, teaches pupils how to scream in their living room; her older brother physically nails his door shut to play guitar with an amp and a drum machine\u2014but childhood is quiet. In her silence she longs to go back, to go backward\u2014the repetition-compulsion, in Freud\u2019s terms. \u201cWas I trying to relive my childhood,\u201d she asks, \u201conly this time without dad?\u201d<\/p>\n

The unheimlich<\/em> (\u201cunhomely\u201d) is tied up with nostalgia\u2014the ache to return home. Ellen rarely leaves their home, though it hardly seems safe\u2014her father still haunts it, or perhaps still haunts only Ellen. The uncanny child is closer to the membrane of the spirit world. His ghost turns up in her room one night, \u201csitting in the armchair whistling.\u201d He lectures and taunts her. \u201cHow could I shut him up?\u201d she thinks. The fish-boning knife she keeps hidden in her room is no help, she knows: \u201che was already dead.\u201d Her only recourse is to write in the notebook that is otherwise verboten: \u201cYou\u2019re dead. You can\u2019t come here.<\/em>\u201d She gives him the notebook and watches him read. That does the trick. \u201cPrinting links the present with forever,\u201d Postman writes. \u201cIt carries personal identity into realms unknown.\u201d Writing makes thoughts more real; it creates reality, turns thoughts into acts.<\/p>\n

The thought that \u201cone day I might speak again\u201d is horrible to Ellen, and yet she knows her will has limits. \u201cThis staying silent couldn\u2019t possibly last a lifetime \u2026 No one could ask that of me.\u201d The only logical, \u201cpossible outcome\u201d of her silence is death, she decides, her own death, in youth: \u201cthe thought came to me from somewhere that I would have to die.\u201d She\u2019ll rewind to a time before her existence. She\u2019ll undo herself, with God\u2019s help\u2014God can still hear her thoughts, and she is sure he will answer her prayers. But, \u201chow long would I have to wait?\u201d Literal death is preferable to the end of childhood; to becoming larger, more conspicuous, more like her father; to being unable to hide: \u201cThe whole idea of growing up felt completely wrong \u2026 I saw no other way.\u201d She avoids mirrors, \u201cnot wishing to see what growing was doing\u201d\u2014\u201cafraid the transformation had already begun.\u201d In leaving childhood, she becomes monstrous. She is afraid of herself, must hide from herself. She must subvert aging through death.<\/p>\n

If books invented childhood, in Postman\u2019s view, electricity led to its demise\u2014\u201cthe telegraph began the process of making information uncontrollable.\u201d The telegraph \u201caltered the kind of information children could have access to, its quality and quantity, its sequence, and the circumstances in which it would be experienced.\u201d Television in particular hastened the disappearance of childhood as we know it. Suddenly children had access to everything adults knew, in a format they could instantly grasp. I think of Carol Anne in Poltergeist<\/em> communing with the TV set. (Postman quotes Reginald Damerell: \u201cNo child or adult becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. What skills are required are so elemental that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.\u201d) Suddenly children had answers to questions they hadn\u2019t asked. And that TV is real, or at least realistic, is what destroys childhood innocence. \u201cTo what extent does the depiction of the world as it is<\/em> undermine a child\u2019s belief in adult rationality, in the possibility of an ordered world, in a hopeful future?\u201d Postman asks. What happens when children see adults don\u2019t know more than they do? Margaret Mead called it a \u201ccrisis of faith.\u201d If there are no adults, there can be no adults in the room.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fascinated by fiction that depicts the end of childhood as an unheimlich<\/em> moment of self-realization in the simplest sense\u2014the moment a child realizes they are a self, a singular consciousness distinct from the world. \u201cIt happened\u201d to Frankie in The Member of the Wedding<\/em>, by Carson McCullers, the summer she was twelve and had \u201cgrown so tall that she was almost a big freak.\u201d What \u201chappened\u201d is so sudden she cannot understand it. Frankie\u2019s brother Jarvis has come home from Alaska and announced he\u2019s getting married; this changes everything:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is certainy a small place,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes you say that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean sudden,\u201d said Frankie. \u201cThe world is certainy a sudden place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know,\u201d said Berenice. \u201cSometimes sudden and sometimes slow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frankie\u2019s eyes were half closed, and to her own ears her voice sounded ragged, far away:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me it is sudden.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea of the wedding gives Frankie \u201ca feeling she could not name.\u201d \u201cThey were the two prettiest people I ever saw,\u201d she says. \u201cI just can\u2019t understand how it happened.\u201d Jarvis and his bride-to-be are receding from her, through the portal of \u201cthe wedding at Winter Hill,\u201d into a charmed adult life (\u201cI bet they have a good time every minute of the day\u201d) while she is stuck in limbo: \u201cFrankie was too tall this summer to walk beneath the arbor as she had always done before \u2026 Standing beside the arbor, with dark coming on, Frankie was afraid.\u201d She tells Berenice, \u201cI wish I was somebody else except me.\u201d Once you know you are a person, you also know you are not, cannot be, anyone else. Other people\u2019s happiness does not happen to you.<\/p>\n

In Richard Hughes\u2019s A High Wind in Jamaica<\/em>, a group of children are captured by pirates. Life on this pirate ship is surprisingly uneventful: \u201cThe weeks passed in aimless wandering \u2026 things ceased happening.\u201d Until, that is, \u201can event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance.\u201d Emily, who is ten, \u201csuddenly realized who she was.\u201d While playing house in a nook near the bow of the ship, \u201cit suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

She began to laugh, rather mockingly. \u201cWell!\u201d she thought, in effect: \u201cFancy you<\/em>, of all people, going and getting caught like this!\u2014You can\u2019t get out of it now, not for a very long time: you\u2019ll have to go through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before you\u2019ll be quit of this mad prank!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Emily begins to wonder why she is her and not someone else, \u201cout of all the people in the world who she might have been\u201d\u2014\u201cHad she chosen herself, or had God done it?\u201d Was the self a conspiracy with God? Is she<\/em> a god? The \u201cwhole fabric\u201d of life, now that she was \u201cdiscrete,\u201d a person with the treacherous power of consciousness, seemed \u201cvaguely disquieting.\u201d I had a similar moment in my life, at some point in adolescence\u2014an apprehension of myself as a being with an edge, which I was inside. Uncanny.<\/p>\n

Writing in 1982, Postman describes the emergence of \u201can adult-child\u201d: \u201ca grown-up whose intellectual and emotional capacities are unrealized and, in particular, not significantly different from those associated with children.\u201d Ellen could be a \u201cchild-adult,\u201d a child whose intellectual and emotional capacities are not significantly different from those of the grown-ups around her. In life, her father was as impetuous and unreliable as a child, and after his death, everyone in Ellen\u2019s family believes that someone else is in control: \u201cI thought about who actually decided things in our house and ended up realizing that we all probably thought it was someone else.\u201d It\u2019s a delicate system of projected responsibility to which \u201ceveryone needed to contribute, otherwise it fell apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

We learn this from Ellen herself of course, first-person, present-tense Ellen: \u201cIt was as if the calm that sometimes descended on us was dependent on such a fine-grained network of understanding and good will that no one felt inclined to break with the implicit order of things.\u201d At moments like these, Ellen does not sound like a child. I wondered at times if this was sloppiness on behalf of the author or translator (Martin Aitken), but it could also be intentional, a way of showing that Ellen really is becoming monstrously adult-like, operating with the intellect not of an innocent but a latently criminal mind. \u201cThrough the miracle of symbols and electricity our own children know everything anyone else knows\u2014the good with the bad,\u201d Postman writes. \u201cNothing is mysterious, nothing awesome, nothing is held back from public view.\u201d There is no shame.<\/p>\n

Welcome to America<\/em> is almost a horror novel; it arouses \u201cdread and creeping horror,\u201d as Freud writes of the uncanny and \u201call that is terrible.\u201d That filet knife in Ellen\u2019s desk drawer is like Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s bomb under the breakfast table, a machine of suspense. Ellen\u2019s mother\u2019s willful denial (\u201cnothing wrong with us\u201d), her brother\u2019s almost flirtatious hints at violence (\u201cDo you want me to hit her?\u201d he asks their mother)\u2014over 124 pages, there\u2019s a ratcheting of tension that feels unsustainable. The reader becomes convinced something<\/em> terrible will happen. But what? A rape? More \u201cmurder\u201d?<\/p>\n

Nothing happens. Ellen tries her mother\u2019s cigarettes; her mother is unimpressed, offers her coffee. The child smokes and reads comics on the balcony. \u201cIt occurred to me that I might be happy,\u201d Ellen thinks. Nevertheless, she expects an early death; she continues to conspire with God, \u201cwho was going to cut my life short.\u201d The sense of threat, the threat of threat, is never resolved\u2014is that then horror? If the question the fear asks is never answered? In The Weird and the Eerie<\/em>, Mark Fisher writes, \u201cthe sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something.\u201d Hence, an eerie silence, when you expected a Wilhelm scream.<\/p>\n

Though readying for death, Ellen \u201ccould not\u201d imagine her family at her funeral. Whether she tries and is unable, or simply refuses, to indulge in that fantasy isn\u2019t clear. Either way, she knows she won\u2019t be there. This is how the end of childhood prefigures death. At some undefined moment you cross over; you leave your child self behind. You can\u2019t even say goodbye\u2014you won\u2019t be there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On strange, silent children, the trauma of adulthood, and Linda Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd\u2019s novella<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Uncanny Child by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 5, 2019 \u2013 On strange, silent children, the trauma of adulthood, and Linda Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd\u2019s novella\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/05\/the-uncanny-child\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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